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Congratulations to Mortendk and Matthew Saunders, our newly elected Directors at Large, representing the community on the board of the Drupal Association. Please join me in thanking all the candidates who put themselves forward to stand for election.

This was our third community election for the rebooted Drupal Association. We’ve learned a lot along the way and made some minor adjustments as we went, but it´s always good to reflect in the process, and perhaps reassess how we go about this in the future. We’re excited to welcome Matthew to the board and have Morten continue on for another year.

This year we’ve heard and share the community´s disappointment about the lack of diversity amongst the candidates and welcome everyone’s ideas on how to ensure we reach out wider next time. If you know great people who would be willing to serve on the board, please help us and encourage them to nominate themselves next year.

We also need to encourage more people to vote. This year 668 people cast their vote. That is 0.36% of eligible voters, which compares with last year when 0.55% of eligible voters cast a vote. Voting was open for 6 days, as opposed to 2 weeks last year. So that may well be a factor in the lower turn-out. Nonetheless we should explore the reasons, and find ways to engage more of our community in this process in the future. We´ll be opening discussion on the elections on groups.drupal.org and invite all those interested to share their thoughts.

Finally, I’d really like to thank Tatiana, Neil and Holly for taking on the work of running the elections, and outgoing community board member Pedro Cambra not only for wrangling the election software, but for being so great to work with over the past year.

Voting is now open for the 2013 At-Large Board positions for the Drupal Association! If you haven’t yet, check out the candidate profiles and review the Meet the Candidate sessions (first and second) that we held. Get to know your candidates, and then get ready vote.

How does voting work? Voting is open to all individuals who have a Drupal.org account by the time nominations open and who have logged in at least once in the past year. These individuals’ accounts will be added to the voters list on association.drupal.org and they will have access to the voting.

To vote, you will rank candidates in order of your preference (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). The results will be calculated using an “instant runoff” method. For an accessible explanation of how instant runoff vote tabulation works, see videos linked in this discussion.

Elections will be held from September 15, 2013 through September 19, 2013. During this period, you can review and comment on candidate profiles on association.drupal.org and engage all candidates through posting to the Drupal Association group.

It’s time! After almost a year and a half of work we are at the finish line. D7 Drupal.org is open for community QA. We invite you all to login to the site, look around, do some of the things you usually do on Drupal.org and report any bugs or problems you encounter. Community QA will last for at least 3 weeks. The launch date will be sometime after DrupalCon Prague and will depend on how many bugs you find.

Before You Start

For this upgrade project our goal was a straight port to Drupal 7. No major regressions, no major new features. And indeed nearly all sections and pages on D7 Drupal.org will look the same as they do now on Drupal 6. There is only one page which will change significantly – the issue page. Awhile ago we wrote a detailed explanation of the changes and why they had to happen. Please be sure to review the post before going to the QA site.

Note that patch testing on the QA site may be somewhat delayed relative to production, but with patience, should be fully functional.

Ready to Do Some QA?

We’ve also set up an #drupal-d7qa IRC channel on Freenode, a place for QA participants to talk to each other and the development team.

Any Video Tutorial Available?

Good question. In preparation for the community QA Melissa Anderson and Neil Drumm held a QA orientation session, where they talked about our QA server, and where and how to report issues. They also briefly showed the new Drupal.org issue pages. The recording is available below:

Now is the time! As we announced on August 16, we are looking to fill the two At-Large Director positions that are opening. The At-large Director position is specifically designed to ensure community representation on the Drupal Association board and we strongly encourage anyone with an interest to take part in the process.

The Board of Directors of the Drupal Association are responsible for financial oversight and setting the strategic direction of the Drupal Association. New board members will contribute to the strategic direction of the Drupal Association. Board members are advised of, but not responsible for matters related to the day to day operations of the Drupal Association, including program execution, staffing, etc.

Directors are expected to contribute around five hours per month and attend three in-person meetings per year (financial assistance is available if required). You can learn more about what’s expected of board members by reviewing the board member agreement.

The self-nomination form that will allow you to throw your hat in the ring is open for just a few more days:

Update: Pushes to contributed modules and sandboxes are once again possible, thanks to the work of Sam Boyer and Damien Tournoud. Go forth and contribute!
We are experiencing technical problems with repositories hosted on the Drupal.org git server.
The…

The Drupal Association Board is having their quarterly retreat at DrupalCon Prague in just a few short weeks, at which point they’ll be reviewing draft 2014 budget for the year, which will include an amount set aside for Drupal.org improvements. We want to ensure that the community has input on what this budget is spent on, but unfortunately the previous data we have on what the community wants is almost two years old. And, because of the tight timeline, we need to do this quickly.

Therefore, the Drupal.org Software Working Group is seeking input from the community to help us determine two to three significant improvements for Drupal.org to be started on by Drupal Association staff at the beginning of 2014 (yes, Drupal.org D7 upgrade will be finished this year!). If you’d like to provide your input on the Drupal.org roadmap for the first part of 2014, please visit the 2014 Drupal.org feature brainstorming group. You can review and “vote up” other peoples’ proposals, or propose your own ideas. We’ll be leaving the call for ideas open until 00:00 GMT on September 2, 2013.

We will then look at the results gathered, consider our constraints (budget, development, other necessary maintenance work, volunteer momentum) and make the best possible choice we can for the next projects. At this time, we are likely to avoid any projects that would block the forward movement of others. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include them. Please do. Just know that we have some work to do before the next epic undertaking. Also note that these votes will almost certainly not correspond directly to the initial priorities that we publish. There will be very practical reasons why some of the top-ranked ideas won’t be a part of this batch. We will explain the reasoning behind our choices, but we probably won’t be able to explain the reasoning for every choice we do NOT make.

We acknowledge this interim process to be severely sub-optimal. The timeline is too short, the tools are awkward, we won’t get enough feedback from a broad enough representation of the community, and we acknowledge that different stakeholders will have equally important, competing, or even conflicting priorities. One of our highest priorities as a Working Group is to develop efficient and inclusive process for collecting, prioritizing, and implementing Drupal.org improvements, a process which will allow us to get the widest community feedback possible and make informed decisions. That takes time, however, and we cannot afford to put improvements on hold until it’s worked out.

We will be re-engaging the community in 2014 with more robust process to gather more ideas about how Drupal.org can better serve its varied audiences. We’d love to have you think hard about small-scope ideas with wide-ranging impact in this go-round, but we also want to know the truth about where it hurts.

Express the needs, risks, and benefits of your ideas as clearly as you can, we’ll look at the entire picture to figure the best way we can move forward, and we’ll share the results with you in a few weeks.

Update: Drupal 7.24 is now available.
Drupal 7.23, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.23 release notes for a full listing.

The Drupal.org Security Team and Infrastructure Team has discovered unauthorized access to account information on Drupal.org and groups.drupal.org.
This access was accomplished via third-party software installed on the Drupal.org server infrastructure…

Drupal.org and its sub-sites (api.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, etc) will be going down for 30 minutes Thursday, May 9, 17:00 PDT (May 10, 0:00 UTC). This maintenance window will be used to remove a core hack. Please follow the @drupal_infra twitter a…

Takes care of abandoned projects and ownership requests in the Webmasters queue

And does a pretty darn good job as the maintainer for modules like @font-your-face.

How did you get involved with Drupal?

About 4 years ago, I took a job as a developer with Aten Design Group, where we do mostly Drupal projects. At the time, I was pretty skeptical of content management systems, after frustrating experiences with both WordPress and Joomla. But I quickly grew to appreciate Drupal’s modular architecture.

What do you do with Drupal these days?

Most of my Drupal time is spent building websites for clients. I’m fortunate to be able to work on projects I really care about, like the International Center for Transitional Justice, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and the United Nations Development Programme. Apart from client work, I use Drupal as a platform to explore new ideas. With a wide variety of code and a huge active community, Drupal serves as a great incubator.

You’re involved with the Drupal community locally and internationally – can you describe some of the things you do and why you like them?

I co-maintain Drupal Groups (groups.drupal.org), deal with abandoned projects on Drupal.org, do some work on project review applications, help organize the local Denver Drupal meetup, actively mentor a few people, and contribute some modules. I think I like all of this because I feel like I’m actively building the future, either through directly improving the web, or by enabling other people to improve the web.

What got you started in the project application review process?

I didn’t go through the application review process to get my own Git (previously CVS) access, and didn’t realize the process existed for a long time. So I think some feeling of debt played a part in my getting involved. But I also believe the future of Drupal depends on people who aren’t yet involved, and the application process, if not handled well, can very easily be a point where we turn away this next generation of contributors.

What are some of your favorite moments from that process?

It’s always nice to get thanks from new contributors for my feedback, or to discover a cool new module before it even has a release. But I think my favorite moment was when klausi arrived. Before that, I felt like I had to stay actively involved or the whole process might fall apart. When klausi started doing a superhuman number of reviews, I could comfortably step away from the queue for a short (or even long) period of time and avoid both catastrophe and burnout.

Are there any cool projects you’ve learned about through that process?

Commerce Registration is, I think, a great example of why the review process is important to the wider community. After some quick minor bug fixes in the review process, that project was approved and is now part of the Conference Organizing Distribution, used in every DrupalCon site. And the maintainer has gone on to contribute several other modules, a few to Drupal Commons that will be part of the next version of the Drupal Groups site. A more frustrating project review could have easily meant the Drupal community losing all of this.

What is your favorite part about the Drupal community?

It’s rare to hear someone say “I don’t care” in the Drupal community. There’s plenty of work that goes off the rails on passionate debate over what color to paint the bike shed, and that can grow tedious. But our bike sheds are the best-painted on the web (12 coats!), because people really care. I like that.

Tell us a little about your background or things that interest you outside Drupal?

When I was young, I hit myself in the forehead with a boomerang. I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concept, but I’d never had one actually come back. This one did, just as I was turning to see where it had landed. Stitches weren’t great back then, so I still have a scar. I still have problems with tools doing what I say rather than what I expect.

Update: Drupal 7.22 is now available.
Drupal 7.21, a maintenance release which fixes incompatibilities introduced in the Drupal 7.20 security release, is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.21 release notes for further information.

Update: Drupal 7.21 is now available.
Drupal 7.20, a maintenance release which contains fixes for security vulnerabilities, is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.20 release notes for further information.

Drupal.org and its sub-sites (api.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, etc) will be going down for 30 minutes Tuesday, February 12, 5:00 PST (February 13, 01:00 UTC). This maintenance window will be used to upgrade our single sign on system. Please follow th…

Update: Drupal 7.20 is now available.
Drupal 7.19 and Drupal 6.28, maintenance releases which contain fixes for security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. See the Drupal 7.19 and Drupal 6.28 release notes for further information.

DrupalCon Sydney, our first DrupalCon in the Asia Pacific region, has sold out!
We are so excited by the positive response from attendees, we wish we’d booked the opera house instead!

We’ve opened a waiting list for those who missed out on tickets, and will be releasing tickets as they become available, however there are still many opportunities to participate in all the wonderful events surrounding DrupalCon.

DrupalCon is a great opportunity to access hands on instruction from some of the world’s top Drupal trainers. Training programs on Git, Drupal Commerce and Building a Drupal site from scratch also kick off the conference on Wed 6 Feb 2013. If you missed on a ticket to DrupalCon why not snap up a ticket to one of these great training workshops.

The main conference on Thursday and Friday is filled with a rich and diverse selection of sessions from speakers from around the world, as well as home grown talent from the Australian Drupal community. Here’s a selection of our featured sessions.

Two “floating” tracks may be unfamiliar to diehard fans of DrupalCon. The Content Authoring and Case Studies tracks are aimed at broadening the appeal of DrupalCon beyond the traditional audience of geeky Developers, to try and engage a broader audience of non-technical Drupal users.

Our Advanced audience is invited to attend the Core Conversations Summit on Friday, which features a D7 to D8 module upgrade demo with webchick and an hour long D8 open forum with Dries and many Drupal Core Contributors.

Keynotes are always a big part of DrupalCon, and what kind of DrupalCon would it be without Dries Buytaert’s famous Driesnote? Dries will set the scene for the true state of Drupal 8 development and give a view of the road ahead.

After hearing about the future of Drupal, attention shifts to our second keynote, the Honourable Senator Kate Lundy, detailing how open source software makes it possible for governments and their people to engage with each other more directly, during her Friday morning keynote, “From Open Source, to Open Government.” Senator Lundy has been a powerful advocate for the adoption of Free and Open source software, and has been internationally recognised for blazing a pathway for a more open approach to government.

Ever since node 4877 in 2003 we have a “prediction” post up on Drupal.org, where Drupal coders and users can share their vision on what will happen the year ahead with their beloved tool. Ever? Well, we skipped 2012, so we can not look back to the predictions you made last year on this site.

But that should not stop you from making some predictions for 2013. And you are welcome to do so in the comments below. Will parts of Drupal end up in another CMS or framework? Will “WSCCI first” be the slogan or will the consolidation in the CMS landscape and the trend to leave our small island make new bridges towards other PHP projects or even make a new Pangaea, beyond PHP and the web? Will Drupal be the answer in Jeopardy on the question “what is the best CMS?”. Time will tell.

Update: Drupal 7.19 and Drupal 6.28 are now available.
Drupal 7.18 and Drupal 6.27, maintenance releases which contain fixes for security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. See the Drupal 7.18 and Drupal 6.27 release notes for further inf…